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Novell SLES 10 to OpenSUSE 11.1 Migration

In an effort to save on licensing costs I have just completed the migration from SLES to OpenSUSE. I have to say it was a little unnerving to step away from an enterprise class distribution. There were so many choices when it came to choosing the replacement for SLES, I knew we no longer wished to pay the licensing fee’s to only have access to software updates and support that has never been used (IMHO google for me is the best support agreement).

On the cards were CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, and OpenSUSE. Our main requirements were the ability to access upgrades and the use of an auto build system for rapid deployment. CentOS was ruled out early in the piece (unfortunately I have to say only for petty reasons, none of which are worth listing here). So the competition was between Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, now my personal opinion here would be for Ubuntu to be the successor but unfortunately it had a few fatal flaws.

The main positive for Ubuntu was the 5 year life cycle for Ubuntu LTS releases, 8.04 was the last so that gave me 4 years of supported updates. Also the Debian pedegree tied with the ideology of ease of usability. The only real subtractor was the Ubuntu auto build facilities. They just plain failed to function, I followed the directions laid out somewhere in the Ubuntu help pages but the installation of the required components failed. It was just plain clunky and immature, hopefully in time it will get there.

OpenSUSE had the smallest amount of change required for implementation. Almost all of the existing system documentation was still relevant between SLES and OpenSUSE including all custom scripts and applications just slid into place and worked out of the box. Autoyast was also a big massive tick in its favour, we had already been using the autoinstall system for our SLES setup. The only downside to choosing OpenSUSE was the short life cycle. Each OpenSUSE release will only support updates for two years at which point the move to the latest version will be required (either that or go through the process of selecting a new distribution again).

A couple of application compatibility issues surrounding going through two major application changes, those being PHP 5.1 to 5.2 and PostgreSQL from 8.1 to 8.3 but all issues were relatively simple to fix as our applications are developed in house. In summary, the migration has been a complete success and has been relatively painless, there were no real gotchas.

@Basheer
I did a clean install. To the best of my knowledge there would be no available upgrade path from SLES to OpenSUSE. As I had a large web farm to upgrade I used Autoyast to make a new build, then my eCom team tested all our software with the latest versions of Postgres, PHP, and Apache. Once we we happy with the build it was deployed, a lot of rsyncing was going on to move web files and config files and we were done.

For everything else, Apache Config, Postfix Config, Postgres Config etc I just used my existing configs to build new configs and then embedded them into the Autoyast installation file.

My advice would be to take a complete copy of the Harddrive and then do a clean install and work from there. If you cant take a full copy you will want at least your /srv, /home, /etc, /root directories as well as a dump of all the package list on your current installation as a guide to what you need to select on the OpenSUSE install. Also if you are running any databases a text based dump of those as moving the binary DB files will not always work when changing versions (ie mysqldump, pg_dumpall).

Wondering if you have any follow-up to your moving from SLES to OpenSuse, which appears to be something you did a while back. Are you still glad you made that move, any regrets? I was just curious because we also use SLES in our environments, we never call into support either and not entirely in understanding why we are paying besides being able to use the baked QA certified packages in their enterprise repositories. Was just curious on how things are going for you now?